An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors indicated that symbolic mediation was a necessary condition for children to solve problems involving temporally presented stimuli regardless of the modality. It was therefore hypothesized and found that the difficulty the retarded readers experienced was not simply in cross-modal transfer but rather in applying relevant verbal labels to the stimuli even within the same modality. It was concluded that in any test for basic sensory defects in retarded readers, there must be a control for the role of higher cognitive processes. Tables and references are included. (Author/CM)